Crucible

  How was Jake holding up? And Kueilan, Lucy, and the others?

  “It’s putting out lots of smoke,” Jon said, studying the fire critically. “Give me the blanket.”

  Karim, who’d been sitting on the filthy thing, handed it to Jon. “Don’t set it on fire. Wait, Jon, before you start—I’m going to hide the sac. Just in case we… just in case.”

  When the sac was hidden under a rock, Jon began covering and uncovering the fire. One puff of smoke, wait. Two puffs, wait. Three puffs, wait. “Wouldn’t it be funny if I’m actually saying something? Maybe ’You smell bad’?”

  “Hilarious,” Karim said sourly.

  He fell asleep. Exhaustion was just too great. The sleep, dreamless, was so deep that it took Jon’s shaking him vigorously to waken. “Karim!”

  “Sleeeeppp…”

  “No! Look!”

  Resentfully Karim opened his eyes. The sun was high in the sky and Karim was ringed by six Cheyenne braves, dressed in some sort of animal hides sewn with tiny glittering stones and bedraggled feathers. Two of the braves had dirty blond braids, one had bright red hair, and one looked at least part Chinese. They carried spears, bows, and wickedly sharp knives. Their left cheeks were tattooed with tiny moons, stars, and what looked like lipstick cases but probably weren’t. None of them spoke.

  “Hello,” Karim said, feeling like an absolute fool. He lay on the ground, gut churning with diarrhea from wild fruit, looking up at six characters left over from four hundred years ago on another planet.

  One of the braves said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  41

  TERRAN SHUTTLE BUNKER

  By the next day, pain had left Alex unless she touched the tortured areas. She sat huddled in her blanket, holding it a little away from her breasts, and tried to think why she was still alive. Julian had promised her a “quick merciful death” if she told him everything she knew, and she had. He knew now about Karim, Lucy, and the biomass. Her information hadn’t included Jake’s location, but only because she didn’t know it.

  That’s why she was still alive. Julian wanted Jake’s expertise in dealing with the Furs, and maybe Karim’s in dealing with the biomass. Julian would pick up Karim and Lucy at the biomass site, force them to tell him where Jake was, and capture Jake. Then he would use her to make Jake cooperate with him. He couldn’t torture Jake; the old man was too frail. But if he threatened to torture Alex, Jake would help him.

  Or would he?

  Alex hoped not. Once Jake had put Greentrees first, when he was much younger. But now, weak and close to dying, loving Alex like the daughter he’d never had … now? Would Jake help Julian conquer not only Furs but his own people, in exchange for Alex’s life?

  No, she decided. Jake would realize that Alex’s reprieve would be only temporary. Julian would kill her anyway. Jake would know there was no way he could really save Alex from death.

  But from torture …

  She buried her face in her hands. Dora looked up and held out the bowl of now dirty water.

  None of the female Furs seemed to react to Alex’s presence. They didn’t recoil from her smell; they carried on drinking, shitting in one corner, and picking unseen grubs or nits from each other’s fur. They ate the findings. They “talked” to each other in low growls and muted roars. Alex had no idea how intelligent they actually were; dogs, cats, and frabbits could respond to each other’s distress without true sentience. But Alex felt that, within their unknown limits, they were being kind to her.

  Maybe in wild females the Fur xenophobic response was tempered by their socialization. Or maybe the socialization of males exaggerated the response. Or maybe—

  She had no real idea.

  Gently Alex pushed away the bowl of water. A piece of decayed organic matter floated in it. Alex didn’t like to think how it might have got there.

  She forced herself to eat more of the mushy cereal. Cora and Flora had dipped their “hands” into it but hadn’t actually eaten any. Alex needed the energy, even if it made her sick…

  Made her sick. Suddenly she remembered Julian in the cave: “No, you won’t give your pneumonia, or whatever it is, to me, not even if it’s caused by a Greentrees microbe. I’ve got immune-system genemods your biologists can’t imagine.” But she didn’t have a Greentrees microbe. She had a genetically tailored microbe designed to infect human and Fur DNA both. Maybe she had infected Julian!

  She tried to remember what Karim had told her about the contagious period. Had she still been contagious when he took her from the Furs? Were Julian and his soldiers even now vomiting their guts out in the rest of the bunker beyond this fetid cell? Was that why no one had brought fresh food or water?

  Hope surged in Alex. If everyone else was incapacitated, and if she could get the female Furs to help her break down the door—

  She staggered to her feet, letting the blanket fall to the ground. The Furs looked up but didn’t stop eating grubs from each other’s pelts. The tail, Alex noted, seemed an especially fertile feeding ground. She held her stomach in check.

  Leaning against the cell door, she pantomimed pushing hard. The Furs ignored her.

  Alex walked to Cora, who had comforted her last night, and took her hand. She tugged gently. Cora stood, her alien expression unreadable.

  Alex led Cora to the door and again pushed. Cora sat back down and resumed grubbing on Miranda’s tail.

  Again Alex tugged Cora up, then Miranda. They both came with her, but neither would push. They sat down again.

  Frustration took Alex. These stupid creatures, they wouldn’t even try…

  The door opened from the outside, knocking Alex over. A soldier in the black Terran uniform entered, sweeping his gaze contemptuously over the prisoners. Despite himself, his nostrils flared with their strange smell. He set down two bowls, water and food, and gathered up the old ones.

  Alex scarcely noticed his hasty departure. She was too busy staring at the Furs. The females lacked visible noses, let alone flaring nostrils, but their reaction was unmistakable. They clapped their tentacled arms over their necks and turned away from the door, huddling against the far wall. After the soldier left, they removed their arms from what Alex guessed to be holes hidden by the ragged fur. Then all five waved at the air.

  Alex had just learned two things. She had not infected Julian and his Terran troops. And it was only male humans who smelled terrible to Furs.

  That fit, in a peculiar sort of way. Obviously sex differences were greater among wild Furs than among space Furs, or even among humans. Some of those differences seemed to be biological, not cultural. Wild female Furs were less aggressive than males (or else Alex would be dead). They were less xenophobic. This was an alien species, equipped with alien biology, and to that biology, female humans smelled vastly different from human males.

  Then she learned a third thing. Grandma Fur got laboriously to her two feet and one balancing tail. She lumbered to the door and imitated Alex’s pantomime pushing. Then she looked directly at Alex from her two frontal eyes and clumsily, a clearly learned gesture, shook her head from side to side.

  No. It won’t help.

  The Furs and she could communicate.

  She couldn’t use language. The vocal chords, or whatever Furs had, were too different. For all she knew, the hearing perceptions were equally different Nonetheless, Alex couldn’t stop herself from speaking aloud as she tried to make herself understood with gestures.

  “Alex,” she said, pointing to herself. Then, “Furs.”

  Cora and Miranda gazed at her, unreadable. Dora and Flora went on grooming each other. Grandmother was asleep.

  “Them,” Alex said, pointing to the door. “Bad! Kill!” She pantomimed stabbing herself and then cautiously stabbing in Miranda’s general direction. Maybe protection of the cub would stir Cora. It didn’t. They watched her, impassive except for an occasional baring of teeth that made Alex nervous. Threat? Yawn? Critical review of her acting?

&n
bsp; How had Nan Frayne built such trust and understanding with these aliens?

  Through months, years, decades. Alex probably had hours.

  She tried again, pantomiming all of them crashing the door and running free. Cora reached for the water bowl; Miranda crawled onto Grandmother Fur, waking her.

  Not a success.

  When Cora had drunk her fill, Alex dipped her hand in the water and then into cereal. Jake, Ben had said, had used drawings to communicate with the male Furs. Karim had used drawings to communicate with the Vine.

  “Furs,” she said, dripping cereal from one finger in the shape of a tailed biped with three eyes. Laboriously she drew five of these, one smaller than the others.

  Miranda drew close to watch.

  Encouraged, Alex drew a human stick figure with cereal blobs for breasts, then pointed to herself. “Alex.”

  Now Cora and Grandmother gazed at the cereal-smeared floor.

  Alex was running out of room. She scrunched herself against the door to free floor space, and sketched three human males. She gave them what she hoped looked like guns, although they were mostly cereal blobs. Then she shouted, “Zzzzzzzzzzl” hastily drew lines from the humans to herself and the Furs, and smeared all six figures out of existence. For emphasis she flopped over, looking dead.

  Miranda and Cora tentatively tasted the cereal rubbed across the floor and spat it out.

  Alex groaned. It wasn’t working. Either female Furs were less intelligent than males, or they were so much more passive they didn’t care if they died, or their perceptions were so different from humans that the pictures had been meaningless to them.

  “Stupid creatures! As long as the door stays shut, you don’t even think about how much danger you’re in!”

  Grandmother Fur dipped one tentacle in the water and then in the cereal.

  Alex watched, gaping, as the old Fur drew five Furs, less expertly than even Alex’s sorry attempts, but nonetheless recognizable. Then she drew four crested male Furs beside them, carrying “guns.” She looked at Alex.

  “Your males aren’t going to rescue you! They’re either infected or dead!”

  No. That wasn’t what Grandmother had meant.

  Alex looked again at the crude cereal smears. The male Furs each had a slash across their “torsos.” No wild Fur wore a sash. These were space Furs, set to carry off the Fur females. That’s why there were four of them; Grandmother knew she was too old to breed.

  Alex gazed at the alien, unreadable expression. As if on cue, the other four Furs leaped up and began their hopping and keening routine. Grandmother went on gazing at Alex, who warned herself against anthropomorphization but nonetheless thought that the old female’s eyes held a warning: You will only make it worse.

  Alex wasn’t sure it could get worse.

  42

  ALONG THE RIVER

  Lying flat on his back and looking up at the Cheyenne hunting party, Karim had a sudden memory of Dr. Shipley describing a Cheyenne chief, White Buffalo or Antelope or something like that (Karim had never seen either animal), who was shot down during a massacre by old-style Americans. The chief had stood in front of his dwelling, arms crossed, and sung a death song: “Nothing lives as long as the earth and the mountains.” Shipley had recited this admiringly, adding that the original Cheyenne had been among the most spiritual and high-minded of all Indians, devoted to what Shipley had called “the splendor of the mysterious fullness from which all creation must come.”

  These braves didn’t look very spiritual to Karim. They scowled down at him in their ludicrously pretentious, technologically irrelevant clothing. The Cheyenne tribe on Greentrees had been a voluntary association; most of the settlers buying their way in had come from Caucasian, Negroid, or even Asian stock. Their leader, the romantically demented Larry Smith, had changed his name to Blue Waters. Their culture was deliberately re-created, not inherited. Could they actually track?

  Jon McBain jumped right in. “We’re so glad to see you! The smoke signals were just to attract your attention; the method was described in a deebee. I’m Dr. Jon McBain, a xenobiologist. This is Karim Mahjoub, he was… well, never mind that. We’d like to propose an alliance.”

  The six braves turned as one to leave.

  Jon grabbed the closest sleeve, and Karim tensed. But the brave merely stared stonily at Jon, who hastily released the animal-hide sleeve. Karim staggered to his feet.

  “We have proof that Julian Martin and his Terran soldiers armed the wild Furs against the Cheyenne. Now we’re trying to destroy Martin.’’

  The braves turned around.

  It was hard to tell from their demeanor which one was the leader. But the same blond who had originally said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” now said simply, “Why?” Karim concentrated on him.

  “We want to destroy Julian Martin because he has killed Greentrees citizens, and tried to set groups of citizens against each other, and illegally armed Furs against your people, and tortured and killed one of our leaders, and kidnapped another. We sent the smoke signals because we need your help finding the abducted woman, Alex Cutler.”

  No response. But the brave went on listening.

  “We were told that you can track anything,” Karim continued desperately. “Alex Cutler was taken by Julian Martin’s soldiers from a place upriver two nights ago. They had rovers, probably two of them. They—”

  “And when she was taken, your Alex Cutler was with the band of wild Furs on the river,” the brave said impassively.

  So they had been watching. The Cheyenne had had spies, scouts … how? The human and Fur camps, a quarter mile apart, had both been in the kill-clean zone. There was no cover, no trees or brush… the Cheyenne had either scouted along the riverbed itself or crept by night so silently over the blank landscape that not even the wild Furs had detected them.

  Karim’s spirits rose.

  “Yes,” he said to the blond brave. “Alex was sick. She deliberately sickened herself with a disease we hoped to give to the wild Furs.”

  “Why?”

  “So their females would carry it back upstairs—I mean, so the space Furs would take the wild females—they’ve been doing that, you know—to their spaceship and the space Furs would in turn become infected. We’re at war with them, no less than you must be. They’ve killed Cheyenne and Mira City alike.”

  Again no response. Karim realized how far-fetched and convoluted his story sounded. And he hadn’t even mentioned the biomass or the Vine… Jake should be doing this. Jake had always been the negotiator, the mastermind, the manipulator.

  Jon blurted, “If you help us track Alex Cutler, it would help us both! Don’t you want to punish Julian Martin for arming the wild Furs against you?”

  Karim saw, as Jon did not, the sudden flash of contempt in the blond brave’s eyes. Karim said quickly, “Not punishment. Cutting off the flow of arms to the wild Furs, before it grows to include Terran weapons not even Mira City can— could have—matched.”

  Something passed among the six men: not glances but some subtle shift of body weight, almost imperceptible alteration of stance. The blond brave said, “My name is River Cloud.”

  Relief made Karim’s knees wobble.

  The Cheyenne were as direct and efficient as even Jake could have wished, and as silent as Karim wished Jon could be. River Cloud listened to the expanded version of Karim’s story and issued orders to his war party. Two of them took off in one direction, two more in another, and the remaining brave down the riverbank. “Where are they going?” Jon said.

  “To find Alex Cutler, to find Jake Holman, and to catch fish. You are hungry.”

  Karim was more than that. Now that someone else was safely in charge, he felt himself slipping into weakness greater than he’d ever imagined. It was an effort to stand. Impassively, River Cloud led him to a deadfall Karim had not noticed and motioned to him to crawl within. Instantly Karim and Jon fell asleep. When Karim woke it was night and a mess of cooked fish l
ay beside him, wrapped neatly in leaves. He and Jon devoured them, then crawled out of their den to find River Cloud seated on the riverbank with three of the braves.

  What was the protocol here? Karim sat down, hoping any offense would be attributed to his unspiritual and misguided ignorance and not to malice. He needed River Cloud.

  The blond brave said, “Jake Holman and the five people with him, three women and two men, are safe. They will stay where they are. Running Bush will hunt game for them, since they cannot feed themselves.”

  River Cloud’s contempt was clear. Karim confined himself to “Yes,” and put a restraining hand on Jon’s arm.

  River Cloud continued, “Julian Martin is being tracked. What do you plan to do when we find him?”

  Should he tell the Cheyenne about the spores? Karim was aware of his rising anger at the brave’s disdain. But anger wasn’t a good reason to impress. And the Cheyenne might take the spore sac for their own use. No, better to look the fool, however painful that was.

  He mumbled, “We don’t have a plan yet.”

  Jon said, “Where are the space Furs? Did you find them?”

  “We have known where they are since they landed,” River Cloud said. “They don’t leave their shuttle in the Avery Mountains, except to fly it in search of wild Fur females. And then they wear space suits. They are afraid of contracting your microbial disease. But you don’t know if you can still infect them, do you?”

  “How do you know that?” Karim said quickly.

  “Because Julian Martin shot the male wild Furs before the disease could develop. And he took the females away. Your proof has all vanished.”

  So the Cheyenne had witnessed the massacre. They had seen Alex carried off by Julian, and apparentiy seen the wild females taken, too. They’d already understood more of the situation than Karim had thought possible.

  Jon burst out, “How much do you know about microbial diseases? I thought you were trying to live like savages!”

  River Cloud said coldly, “We learn what we must about the white man’s world in order to protect ourselves against it. My grandfather was First Landing, a geneticist.”